Haeny Yoon and Lalitha Vasudevan
episode 22 To the Classroom Podcast
October 16, 2023
My guests today are Dr. Haeny Yoon and Dr. Lalitha Vasudevan, researchers who study play in early childhood and adolescence. We talk about the many benefits of play, the role of adults in setting up and facilitating play, and ways that play supports conceptual knowledge development as well as reading and writing skills. Later, I’m joined by colleagues Emily Strang-Campbell and Gina Dignon, as well as longtime friend Alison Porcelli, former teacher and school administrator and now a district coach, who is a co-author of two practitioner resources: Purposeful Play and Boosting English Language Acquisition in Choice Time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome Dr. Haney Yoon and Dr. Lalitha Vasudevan. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
It's great to be here
Haeny Yoon:
Thank you for having us.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So I loved reading your research papers, and one of the things I noticed in both is you referred to ethnography and I was wondering, do you call yourselves ethnographers? Is that the type of researcher that you are?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Yeah, it's the orientation that I bring to, I would say my work, but really to everyday life. Sort of taking a sense of what's happening, really paying attention to context and taking the kind of over time view to understand, to keep asking questions, to keep seeing and re-seeing is sort of how I orient myself in the world.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And Haeny, what does ethnography mean to you?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, I mean, I would say the same thing. I think that's kind of what brought Lalitha and I together in this world is the idea of ethnography and just the listening, observing, watching, being with, participating, contributing all of those things in the company of children, youth, things like that. And so I think ethnography is definitely a stance. I think for me, a stance of inquiry. I know that there's always these issues of what kind of research people do, but I always think about it as a stance of inquiry and how can I understand and know more?
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I wonder about teachers that are listening and whether that kind of stance could be helpful in the classroom. What are your thoughts on that?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, I mean, I love that question. I think that was a great question because my immediate answer would be yes, I think all teachers should be ethnographers, and if teachers can be ethnographers, I think they would be really great teachers. And I think I've been thinking about what is a takeaway for a teacher? And when we talk about play and when we talk about curriculum, and I feel like we've been adding a lot more things all the time, here's another thing that you could do. Here's another structure that you could perhaps engage with. Here's another set of curricula that might encourage whatever, X, Y, Z. And I just wonder if maybe more than just more things, maybe we just figure out how to have a stance of inquiry and curiosity of what children are doing and kind of build from there. And so I think the holding space and time is really hard in schools, and I wonder if the solution can be that simple, maybe.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
One of the things that I so appreciate Haeny's response, and it really reminds me of one of my favorite pieces that's come out in the last decade or so is a piece that Haeny wrote with her co-author and collaborator, Tran Templeton. It was a piece that came out in Harvard Ed Review, and there's a part of the title that talks about hearing children out and sort of creating opportunities to not just say, yeah, yeah, I'm hearing what kids say I'm, I'm just listening to them. But if you've ever followed the train of thought of a young child, an adolescent, a teenager, it doesn't happen in those discreet, predictable, convenient bursts that often schools are structured around. And so ethnography, it's sort of a ethnographic stance as a educator, I always think about as creating those pauses that, and just to echo something, Haeny said that there's so much about you a school day is just you keep going and going and going, that it can feel like a lot to build in those pauses into the day. And what I love about this piece is that it gives you really rich portraits of what happens when people give the time to where the child's inquiry and imagination and creativity goes, which in some ways you can read and say, wow, what a luxury. And then you think, what else ought we be doing in schools? So yeah, I really would encourage your readers to read that piece. It's a really beautiful and inviting look at what this could look like.
Haeny Yoon:
Thanks, Lalitha.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's, yeah, it's such a stance as a teacher of being curious and interested in everything and all the pieces and how all the pieces fit together. That's so powerful. I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes for sure. Your recent piece in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education centers around multimodal play, I wonder if you could start by explaining what that term is. It's going to be important to a lot of our follow-up questions.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Yeah. That piece came really after a few years of me trying to figure out how to talk about what I was observing with young people. And so it talks about two sets of young people. One set for my dissertation work, one set older teams. And often when we think about play, play seems to be the domain of early childhood, of elementary school, of children. And it seems to be less prevalent in adolescence except in conversations around organized play. Kids play sports, kids play games, kids play video games. And what I kept observing was the ways that the young people I was working with would use the multimodal or that is kind of a way of thinking about all the wide range of resources, tools, media, objects, artifacts in the context where we would spend time and they would play with them. And so I'll give two short examples. One is we were doing an afterschool program at a alternative to incarceration organization. These were young people who were court mandated to attend that court program, and they would come there after school. And so my graduate students and I were facilitating a digital media experience, a workshop for them that went over the course of, I think about 10 or 12 weeks. And we had this plan and we had this vision that we were going to create--we were going to do some work every week. And then over the course of 10 weeks, we'd had this lovely film. Well, that quickly disintegrated, that plan disintegrated because the way that the court system was working at the time, sometimes kids would be mandated to be there for a week, three weeks, two weeks, sometimes they'd have to be there two days a week, three days a week. And so we were really at the mercy of the juvenile justice system. So we devised a way to think about making each experience each kind of workshop day count. And what the teens want to do was create horror movies, but they wanted to do horror movies with a twist. They wanted to do horror satire. And so in doing it though, we saw that there was so much play that happened first, and that play was really significant to figuring out what the story was. And it wasn't that we said, okay, now play. Okay, now storyboard, now film. The play was the kind of conduit through which the story idea grew, was delivered. Somebody would pick up a styrofoam plate and start waving it in the camera, and that became an apparition that became part of the horror story. And so play was meaningful, but play was also very importantly purposeless. It was just a way to be playful with each other. And so when I think about multimodal play, and when in that piece I wrote about, I really wanted to give educators and researchers who work with teens a way to reimagine or re-understand or kind of revision what they're seeing when they see kids idly tapping a pen against a cup or taking silly photographs or doing things that might get marked in our field notes or in our classroom observation notes as being off task, but in fact they are something else. And when we think about the ways that kids interact with an object and that just going back to what Haeny was saying, maybe later that day or later that week, that interaction, that play, that experimentation shows up in something they produce later, we can then start to make sense of it. But the challenge for us adults working with young people is to give the space for there to be play for which we don't know what the purpose is yet.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It takes such trust in process. It takes trust in the children. And it's also, I think for some teachers might feel hard because by nature we tend to want to control and keep things precise and organized and directed and explicit and clear. And so it's a stepping back and it's a trust that needs to happen.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
The other point I will say, just to emphasize, is that I think this can happen when the structure of the place where you are supports that. So if you feel like I have to have everything so precise because otherwise X, Y, and Z, I'm not supported by my institution that that's not the right environment either. So I would say, you really want to support teachers, but you also want to give them the environment to be able to do that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So I think that example of the students who are working on these "horror films with a twist" shows how some of the benefits to play could be around creativity, innovating, mirroring of the writing process in a way of idea generation. What are some other benefits that you, and Haeny that you have found, in your reading of the research and also in your research studies for young people?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
The one thing I'll add to what you said was just the relationships between adults and young people. I think play really opened up different ways of interacting with each other. But I'll turn it over to Haney.
Haeny Yoon:
What Lalitha said at the beginning really resonates with me is that when we think of play, we only think about really young kids. And I don't think most people disagree that really young kids need to play or act. Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I think a lot of people would say that I think as children get older, I think that we automatically assume that they should play less and get serious. And I think what Lalitha just showed is that you can actually be serious in your play. And so I think, Jen, to answer your question, one of the things that I've been looking at is just thinking about what people are doing in terms of play and creativity outside of the realm of education and outside of our discipline. One of the people that I really have been looking up to and quoting a lot, a lot, I probably owe him some money, is Theaster Gates. And he's this Chicago based artist, sculptor, and basically what he talks about, and he really talks about play as a very strong impetus of his work. He takes play so seriously, and he's like, when I take these materials and I think about all the ways that people discard it, but I can imagine something very different with it, and it doesn't have to end up being X, Y, Z, but it's going to end up being something. And it's the idea of trusting the play that happens. Lalitha was saying kids are laughing, playing with cameras, doing whatever seems meaningless and purposeless, but that there is something that comes out of that. And it's almost just that ability to trust that something is going to happen. And I think that's the idea of play is that it's not, I think it's a characteristic or condition that we're trying to develop, imagination and creativity, the willingness to take risks, to make mistakes, things like that. And that's not as tangible. There isn't this lovely thing that we put on the hallway afterwards or there isn't this innovative, Rube Goldberg machine that comes after that. But there is a set of conditions that you develop that allows you to take risks, that allows you to engage in even academic stuff, that it allows you to do your job better, that allows you to work. And so there is a set of conditions that we develop through play and definitely imagination, creativity, thinking outside of what we normally think is definitely just a few of those things.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm wondering about the role of adults in play, and when we talk about a classroom setting in particular to, you know, you already spoke back to this a little bit Lalitha, but setting up, this is time for play and then we're moving on to the composition where we're going to play with these materials and then we're going to do our science report. So either in the structuring of play or the inclination for adults to want to structure play or while kids are engaged in play, what could the role of adults be in guiding or supporting that play? And I know you come from different perspectives of different age groups, so maybe Haeny we could start with you and thinking about young children setting up play or guiding play, what's the role of adults there?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, I think, So I feel like there was this phase in early childhood especially where we talked about free and flexible play as something that is agentive and useful for children. And I still believe that, but I think in that framing of it sometimes is we don't necessarily include the adults being in that space. And so I think this is a great question that I actually, it made me step back and think a little bit about what is the teacher's role in all of this? And I think the teacher's role can be really big or small. I think they could facilitate space and time, but I think they could also intervene and participate and contribute. And there, there's this, I think I wrote it on some kind of blog post somewhere in the ether, but there is a story that I tell about a teacher who was just, the kids had a lot of time to play in kindergarten, and this one child was really obsessed with World War II stuff. And so he was really very knowledgeable and intellectual about that. So he was gathering information and watching documentaries on the Discovery Channel, things like that. And he would know all the countries, the key players that were part of World War II. And one of the things that he did in that process was he was drawing swastikas on his paper because that is also part of World War II. And so this is all during play, and I think there's a couple different things that could happen, but you could just kind of ignore it and be like, oh, that's just play, so I'm not going to deal with that. You could intervene, or you could just stop them immediately and be like, what the hell are you doing? Stop making swastikas. And I think what the teacher did was that she went, I go back to the thing that we said at the beginning about ethnography. She asked him a lot of questions: Where did this come from? What is the impetus for this? Because she knew that he also was really into this World War II phase, she knew that that was sort of connected as well. And so what she did is gave him a chance to talk through what his reasoning was, because I think as soon as a child does something that's not appropriate or correct, our impetus is just to be incorrect, stop. But I think what's missing in that is there isn't a conversation of why. Why is it incorrect? Why should I stop? And does the child really understand if it is something like why they should do that? Because sometimes they just stop it because they're not supposed to, but then they don't understand why. And so then she just went further after that to just talk to him about the symbol and to talk to him why it's hurtful and painful to people. And the kid just happened to be Jewish. And so she was, especially your family and community, might not really, might not see that symbol as a symbol of love, but a symbol of hate. I think that's the word that she used. And then I think she simply walked away. It wasn't like she did anything to reprimand him, but just wanted him to think through it. And then afterwards we came back and he had crossed them all out on his paper, which was not with any instruction. And I can't, I'm not saying that story to say that that's how it's always going to happen. It's going to wrap up in a tidy little bow. Everything's going to work out. But I do think that there is a real role that teachers can play in that process and a real space for them. And I think that sometimes we often think that play is not curricular or pedagogical and so that's the time for us to answer emails or do this other thing or all the things that a teacher has to do in a day. But if we consider play as part of, or big part of our curricular and pedagogical goals, then I think that our role as teachers and educators can look very different. And that's where I come back to there is a space for those intergenerational interactions to kind of come together.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And as a literacy educator, I think about that story as an example of how the child's probably synthesizing and processing a tremendous amount of content and learning and through play, working out how do all of these pieces fit together? What's the narrative? What's the story here? What are the individual pieces? What do they mean? And like you said, the teacher could have in that moment, shamed him, shut it down, just stopped. And it probably would've stopped his processing, but instead, through questioning, allowed him to think critically and come to his own conclusions. Yeah, so it's a really powerful story. Thank you for sharing that.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
It makes me also think that sometimes as educators, we react to children with the frustration that they aren't already where we are in our thinking, in our understanding about things. So when a child, I think about language, right? Then when young children are playing with language and they hear a bad word and how we react to that and what a bad word is. And we as adults have been socialized in ways to understand discourses be having certain valances, young children aren't yet there. And I think the same thing carries over with adolescents that even though they look more mature, they talk more maturely in comparison. I think it's, and look, I am guilty of this as well, but sometimes we forget that they are so still becoming, all of us are, but especially these kids who are sort of 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Your question, Jennifer, initially when you said thinking about play for adolescence, it made me think about a teacher I had in high school. His name was Mr. Miller. He was our physics teacher. And Mr. Miller knew that teaching physics was a thing that not everybody was excited to be in, but he had developed a way of teaching physics. Now this is to understand this person, you have to think about the kind of visual was at the time he was older, he was probably just in his fifties, so I shouldn't be calling him older anymore. It gives me great humility to just say that out loud for a minute. And he was a guy who, he was sort of out of central casting. I grew up in suburban New Jersey. He kind of had slacks that went up a little too high, a short sleeve button down shirt. He had a pocket protector with pens in it. He had horn rimmed glasses, a comb over. So very kind of just whatever you wouldn't have immediately said, this is a jokey guy. And the way he taught us physics was using action figures. And he would line up those He-Man action figures with the changing breast plates and he would say, okay, let's figure out the trajectory that this motorcycle has to fly in order to hit He-Man off this ledge. And I still remember the physics I learned in that. Now am I saying that teachers need to play with toys in order to teach kids to have longer lasting memories of things? I mean, not necessarily, but what I appreciated about him and your question about what role adults play is I think he didn't take things too seriously. He didn't take himself too seriously. He understood that his role was to provide a context for us to learn principles of physics. And he had taught for a while, and I think he understood that kids just like to goof off and that the goofing off could actually be a way of understanding something. So did we hurl action figures at each other? Absolutely. Did we then try to do it in ways that would be able to better aim? Now no one got hurt. Let me please say I don't want poor Mr. Miller to get in trouble. But I think about this in my work as an ethnographer in my work doing kind of what we talk about as participatory ethnography where we try to create conditions for the people in a context to enter into and reshape this work and play. And adhering to play has been an important part of this. And in that work I've observed educators and most of my work has been situated in alternative to incarceration settings. So with young people who are juvenile justice involved, including a 15 year relationship with an organization here in New York City. And this was an organization that had incredible educators as part of it. And one of the things that made so many of them so impactful was what ended up being really a kind of embrace of a pedagogy of play that they used playfulness to create playful context. And one teacher said it explicitly, he said, by the time kids are here, they're sort of 16, 17-20. This is the older youth program. And he said they think they have to be grown, they have to be adults, they have to be serious, they can't smile, they can't goof off. And so I act a little absurd. And so then they are silly in response to me, and then it just allows us to be together in this different kind of way as a class community. And so he used play and humor to destabilize some of the kind of assumptions about what it meant to be a student, a teacher in that space, and try to create more of an egalitarian context. I also think I've observed educators in the same organization, but also in some of the K-8 schools where we've done work, who use play to share different parts of themselves with kids, to humanize themselves even as they're asking kids to be more human. And some of that has come in the form of giving kids lots of choice and what an assignment can look like. So they might say, Hey, you just read this book, how would you tell someone about this book? Go write a play about it. Go make a movie about it. And so just inviting them to play with genre and form. And then to Haeny's point, sometimes it's just providing the conditions and then stepping away. But then the other piece seems to be following through and then also being, allowing for a lot of space in the assessment. So sometimes we're really good about setting up conditions for the assignment or the activity or the experience, and then we are either beholden to or we feel compelled to assess based in some ways. So this is either given a grade or an incomplete. And so one of the things that might be interesting for educators and adults in spaces with young people to talk to about together is what are we looking at? What are we hoping and how can we maintain a kind of ethos and stance of play that maintains that kind of curiosity about young people even in our assessments, even in our sense-making about what they're doing. And so there's versions of this, the work of Pat Carini and Margaret Hemley from the Prospect School when they did the descriptor review of a child that was so based on what do you see happening in this children's piece of work rather than what don't you see really work to create an anti-deficit approach? What I would add to something that Haeny said about that teacher who I think observed something is that we also, you said it takes so much trust in allowing these spaces. I think it also takes trust in yourself as an educator to say, I might not know where this is going, but how can I build context and conditions for my own play so that I can continue to support the young people I'm charged with supporting? So I think that's Haeny and I have been talking a lot also about how to work with educators to support their own play, not only for greater pedagogical play, but also for their wellbeing. And thinking also about the materials. What are kids playing with, the materiality of learning and creativity in play and how that might open up our ways of creating spaces.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think it's a real fact that teachers feel very under pressure. Yeah, they've got high stakes testing in upper elementary school through middle school, but even in the lower grades, it's very commonplace that teachers are reporting things to administration on benchmark windows. Are kids making progress? Are they growing? There's progress monitoring and screening and there's pressure to make sure that kids are achieving. And I think it would be wise to talk a little bit about the real benefits to literacy when there's space and time for play. So if we could, let's think about benefits to vocabulary development, benefits to oral language, benefits to writing and craft, benefits to comprehension. Anywhere you want to take this, I'd love to talk about specific benefits for literacy instruction. Haeny, do you want to start us off.
Haeny Yoon:
I can start. I am going to tell another story. So stories. So I was in a kindergarten classroom a few years ago, and basically, I'm going to start with a math example. So they had to do the typical triangle squares, circle, whatever, five shapes or something. I don't even know what the five shapes are, so I can't even identify them. But they were just all in a Ziploc bag and basically the kids just had to take them out and I don't know, glue them all over the paper. I'm not sure if there was a rhyme or reason to it. I'm sure it was part of the lesson, but you just glue it in the paper or you just take these triangles, circles, whatever. And one of the kids was like, I don't want to, and he was very adamant about it, and the teacher was like, no, you have to. And he's like, no, I don't want to. He's I want a dodecahedron.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh,
Haeny Yoon:
I was like, what in the world? So I'm just writing it down and then I'm later on, I'm going to just ask him about it. So I'm like, oh, where? So you said you wanted a dodecahedron and I'm just wondering where you learned that. And he's like, from Team Umizoomi on tv. And I was like, I don't even know what team Umizoomi was. So you could just imagine I'm trying to write out Team Umizoomi phonetically on my piece of paper. Then I had to go back home and Google it and be like, how do I spell this? For some reason I found it and I was like, oh my gosh, that's incredible. But then I was thinking, is that really that incredible? Aren't kids always engaged with whatever the linguistic landscape is that they're a part of? Right? Whether it's television, whether it's the environment, whether it's stuff in the classroom. I go back to one of the things that Anne Dyson has this library of good work on play and literacy. And one of the things that she writes in one of her 200 articles, whatever, is she writes young children, there's a reason why they learn how to spell their name first and they learn how to spell other kids and their friends' names as well before they even learn how to say, write things like the or in or whatever. And I think it's that social relationship part, it's the people that they're around all the time. It's the things that they see and observe in the world around them. And I think back to Maxine Green's idea that when young children enter the world, they're attuned so much to patterns and how the world works. And then later on we tell them how the world works and then all of a sudden we start to notice less of the patterns and the things that are around them, around us and start to just zone in on those little minute discrete details. And I think I'm very aware that there is a very large debate about language and literacy right now and what reading and writing actually means. And I'm not saying that there isn't a space for those things like those discrete skills, but there's also a vast world around young kids where they're really picking up literacy and that when they sit down and start to write about it or when they start to read that, that is such a great entry point for them. I mean, I have so many pieces of kids writing where they're talking, where they're writing McDonald's, where they're writing their friends' names, where they're writing Cartoon Network down at the bottom where they're writing Nickelodeon or Star Wars or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or things that they didn't learn in their phonics lesson, they learn from someplace else. So I think there's an integration of that and I think there's a space for both of those things to happen at the same time. Going back, Jen, to your original point, I do think that there is a space for play to be free and flexible, but there's also a place for play to be structured. I think people thrive in different kinds of conditions sometimes. I'm like that, right? I really like structure. I don't want it to be all free and flexible all the time because then I'll do nothing. But then there is sometimes when I do appreciate the freedom and flexibility because there's something else that happens. And I think that same thing applies to literacy with children is that there are times for structure that really help children grow in their literacy abilities. And I think that structure sometimes is really useful for children, especially emergent readers and writers. But I also think at the same time, there is a space for freedom and flexibility that also allows for different and new things with literacy to kind of come into place. And if you don't have both of them, then you can't have these very simultaneously different things happening in a young child's growth.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, just talking about the difference between the free and the more structured, you're making me think about my youngest daughter who went to a school this past year where they had a nice long recess every day, and she and two of her close friends created this entire world and these characters, and they would every day just pick up where they left off with this story, this complex story. She'd come home at night and she was writing the story and it was so complicated, the world, the characters she started, she went on this app that you can make the avatar and actually create the character that they had imagined on their play. So she's doing this multimodal creation. It was amazing. And then they had a period of time where they were involved in theater and they didn't have time for recess, so recess stopped altogether. And during that time of the day, they were involved in a very structured literal play. So they had to memorize lines and be these characters. Her writing completely stopped her. She missed it. She was starting to kind of get antsy in class. So it had a sort of negative impact on her ability to sit still and focus, but of course she benefited from this other thing as well. But being a little bit more structured, there was a director told her where to move on the stage, how to perform these lines, and I'm sure it made its way back into the play, but it was just really a stark juxtaposition between these very teacher-directed and very student-directed forms of play and the way that they impacted her literacy work. So anyway, I just wanted to share that story. You guys are inspiring stories. Lalitha, what are you thinking about?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I love that story. I mean, I have many connections to it, but I was nodding along and I think it made me think also of how children named their play. And sometimes when you call something play, they look at you like you're crazy because they're engaged. I wouldn't call it that. It was seriously, absolutely right. Yes. So I mean, think Anne Dyson always talks about the work. Is this the play? I mean play is the work of childhood, and Maxine Green talked about it, and I think maybe Vivian Paley talk the sort of serious work of childhood. And then going back to something Haeny said a while ago is as children kind of transitioned into various stages of adolescence, Peter Gray is the person who's often cited for talking about the kind of stark lack of free play, exactly what you're describing, Jennifer of no one told your daughter and her friends to, okay, now go invent a world. Except we know that that's what kids are doing constantly. I love to eavesdrop on all children's conversations. I apologize to anyone whose children I've done that to because they're constantly inventing rules, what properties, different materials have, what it means to be in relation to things, and they're exploding with these ideas. And so one of the things I think we have found my research team and I over the last many years in working with younger and then older adolescents, is that those things haven't really gone away, but the conditions in which that can surface has gotten increasingly diminished. So when we do say, okay, here's a bunch of materials, what should we do with this? That became much more of a powerful prompt than we're going to make a movie. Let's make a two minute movie. Because that was for some kids that was constraining. But when we started with, here's a bunch of materials, and some of them would say, well, I don't even know how to use this recorder. I don't even know how to use this camera. And then once they had familiarity with some of the tools or they would bring in some of their own tools like, Hey, I have this camera laying around at home. Oh, look at this filter I can use on my app. I mean, I'm on my phone. Then the structure made sense because then we could say, okay, we want you to create a two minute thing. And so I think there's that kind of set of competencies that we also can think about that if we want there to be some generative outputs that come out that we can make linkages to, with some of the more consistent skills that we need kids to feel confident and that some of it has to, I would argue, just have that kind of unfettered free play space. The other thing that I've been noticing a lot of, there's been enjoying all the Gen X memes, especially of these kids have it so easy, we were just locked out of the house all day to roam wild and free. And look, there are some truth to that, there was some truth to that. But one of the things that Gray was recently quoted in an article that he and some other folks were looking at what happens when so much of young people's time in childhood, but especially in adolescence, is so supervised, is so surveilled, is so structured that have they not been given the same opportunities to take risks, to learn from failure, to try a bunch of things out, have it not work at all? And how does this translate also to the school environment where a friend of mine was telling me, and I think this is true of a lot of districts, that literally a teacher has to input something like 50 different scores every day because everything is scored. And so now we're using apps to did you come in on time? That's a score. Did you turn this in? Did you use blue pen? That's a score. And so we're really hamstringing educators from being able to follow the narrative, as Haeny said earlier. And I wonder what role then things like professional development play, what role administrators can be invited to reconsider how we think about the materials in a classroom? And then I often think about the fact that kids are consuming, like Haeny said, from everywhere, and they're constantly filtering and recombining things and things will come out and you have no idea where it came from. But inviting educators to take that kind of ethnographic stance might also be a way of saying it's not just about being curious, but that curiosity will actually allow you and your students to take risks will allow new kinds of dodecahedrons to emerge and will allow new worlds to emerge. I say all this really knowing that this is not sort of some sort of simple, okay, go play, everything's solved fix. Because I think Haeny and I talk a lot about just the realities of the conditions teachers are experiencing, but I think what we, I won't speak for both of us, but one of the conversations we tend to have is, so what does the invitation to regularly play? What might it open up and what might it also push institutions to have to rethink if more teachers are saying, Hey, we actually want more of this, and as researchers, I think part of our role is also to continue to tell those stories to push from another perspective.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Haeny and Lalitha, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been such a pleasure chatting with you.
Haeny Yoon:
Thank you so much for having us
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues Emily Campbell and Gina Digon and a longtime friend and colleague, Alison Porcelli, who's an author of two books about play. Thank you so much for joining me.
Alison Porcelli:
Hi Jen. It's such an honor to be here. Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things I was taking away as this whole ethnographer stance that they talked about and just really trusting kids and trusting the process and trusting ourselves, trusting play, that things are going to come out of play and giving that space, which is so hard, as you pointed out with all of the pressures and everything. But I think if there's trust that what is going to come out of this is actually going to impact their literacy and actually it's going to impact their imagination and their creativity and all those things that we want, then maybe as educators, we will feel more comfortable giving that space and time to trust and truly listen to kids. So that was a big thing I was coming away with.
Jennifer Serravallo:
In what ways do you feel like school administrators can set up conditions in their schools to feel like in some ways teachers need permission or freedom or at least the blessing of their school administrators to say, yes, make time for this, make space for this. Are there any practical tips or piece of advice you can give to administrators who might be listening?
Alison Porcelli:
I'm no longer an administrator now. I'm a district staff developer, but I do still, I was an administrator and definitely practiced that stance. And I think giving permission is huge. I mean, I think we would do, just thinking back when I was at PS 59 in the city with Adele, and we would actually have the adults play at faculty meetings. I remember starting a faculty meeting where we were all outside on the playground and everyone was playing and then came in and said, so let's talk about this. How did that feel? I think actually you talked about that recess example, which is so huge. And sometimes these things are happening at recess, teachers don't see it, right? Cause they're not out there during recess. So another thing we really advocated for as administrators, building in an extra recess portion of the day where the teacher could take the kids out. And I think when teachers know that the administrator's in support of that, they're in support of that, they want to go outside. I mean, there's so much research around the benefits that type of brain break gives to kids. So I think we just need to give ourselves permission to trust and listen to this research. But yes, I do think administrators play a big role in even just saying, yes, I want more play in the classroom. So yeah, I think that's big.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Emily, you have a background in educational theater and you work with mostly middle school classrooms, although you also work with elementary. But I'm wondering about your thoughts from the perspective of someone who works with older children and someone with a background in educational theater.
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Well, I think they both mentioned how as kids get older, play tends to dissipate or it's not as valued in the upper grades in middle and in high school. And I just think that in all the examples that they gave, and Lalitha also gave a ton of examples of working with students in middle school, all the, of the activities that they were engaged in within their play. None of it felt like they were doing basic literal thinking. In fact, it felt like in the act of creating and rehearsing and as they said, sort of synthesizing the content together, kids were immediately tapping into their analytical thinking. And I mean, isn't that the hope that we're always striving for? And so to me, that sense of engagement, that sense of just unstructured focus and choice and curiosity, I felt like that was a big term, a repeating word that kept coming up. I mean that's the ultimate goal for all students K through 12 and allowing that space for play and engagement has always been key for all grades I've worked with K through 12. I also think this idea of sometimes play and the words play and silliness for some teachers can equate a loss of control when we're being silly, oh dear, I'm going to lose control of the class. But I would push back as I think our researchers suggested today, that silliness in play can be the entry point into learning really tricky new harder concepts for kids. I often use the term, how are we bringing in high interest, low stake situations where kids can practice and rehearse and create a mess when they're learning sometimes really new complicated ideas or thinking? How are we creating conditions where they can have a go at it, practice first, with them in a high interest way where it's low, there's low stakes involved, and they get to really reach that level of high thinking, analytical thinking without these really intense stakes attached to it. And I felt like they just gave so many beautiful examples of that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Gina, what are you thinking about? What's on your mind?
Gina Dignon:
Wow, I really felt like I learned so much in a short amount of time here. But what's top of mind for me really is how can we bring this stance into professional learning with teachers? Because like you mentioned, Jen, teachers are so stressed about covering curriculum or teaching a curriculum that is a top down told to them, you have to teach this curriculum. And so I was just thinking when I was listening to everyone talk that just defining play and thinking about what play can be because Alison, your book is Purposeful Play. And then they mentioned "purposeless play" and this push pull. And Dr. Yoon was saying she likes structure sometimes and then unstructured time. And so that to me was sort of an interesting concept to explore more, not just with myself but with teachers. Because I think many teachers thrive on structure because you only have a certain amount of minutes in a day.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And Alison, I know your book has a lot of great examples of ways that play is very purposeful. Whether or not the teacher sets the purpose play play has a lot of purposes. Can you share some examples for listeners? And I'll link to your book in the show notes in case people want to check
Alison Porcelli:
It out? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the idea is like there's "play time," which can happen during recess or if the teachers can make time for it in their schedule, which I of course advocate that they do. But usually a lot of times you're only seeing a play time during an early childhood settings. But I have been talking to some teachers about getting creative with what they call it to help administrators buy in. Because what's happening is, I mean, a lot of districts are really into STEAM right now and "design thinking" and what is play it is that's what it's right. So we can call it our design thinking time and our STEAM time. And that is what's happening. So having that time for it is definitely where you're going to get, have a lot of the space for children to play these narrative threads out. And you're going to be able to learn so much about the kids and see a lot of this literacy in authentic action. But then you also have bringing this playful stance, I think as you were talking about Gina and those examples, Jen and Emily too, bringing this playful learning stance to academic times. I do think workshop is such a perfect structure for having a playful stance because there's so much of that time where the kids are off working in partnerships and groups and independently giving kids a lot more choice. I mean, so often I can remember back to my kindergarten classroom feeling pressured, like a student had to write a personal narrative, but what they really wanted to write about was made up stories and video games they were playing and realizing, I can give kids that choice. It doesn't have to be a personal narrative. As long as they're meeting the standards about a narrative, that's fine. So I think giving that more choice, and they mentioned that too with genre and form, independent writing projects are so playful. And then just really listening to kids and getting to know kids and tapping into what are the things that they are really passionate about and using that as a way to frame a unit. Kristi Mraz one of my co-authors, was so brilliant at that in her kindergarten classroom and it would change every year, but she would listen to what are the kids really passionate about? And one year it was Star Wars, and so she made her whole reading unit, we can become Jedi master readers. And as they would get through different bends, they would get their Yoda ears and they would get their light saber pointers. And the whole thing was so playful. The kids didn't know that they were even engaging in reading. They just thought they were playing. So I think there's a lot of ways, but really listening to kids and seeing what is it that they're passionate about? So finding that space, I think it all comes back to that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you. Any last thoughts before we wrap up for today about practical ways to bring this into the classroom and especially to the benefit of literacy skills and literacy instruction?
Emily Strang-Campbell:
When both researchers were talking, the power of the collecting phase of the writing process is just, I mean, even looking over some of the lessons, as you were just saying, Allison, creating an independent writing project, and even just in the actual collecting phase of creating their own either personal narrative or fiction narrative, like creating found poems on lesson 3.22, or what if stories, lesson 3.24 and just opening that bridge for kids to even respond to their reading responses. Maybe they can create a book trailer or a book commercial off of a story they just finished. Giving a range of resources and materials that they can choose as a way to respond to their reading or writing, especially in the upper grades in middle schools, can be such a powerful way to bring choice, curiosity, and play into their actual work. So that really stood out to me in some of their suggestions.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I wonder too, how many kids who teachers would view as reluctant writers, who aren't getting a lot on the page, if they were given time to explore some of those strategies through play first. You might just be able to say them "You just wrote a story! You just wrote a story through what you were doing with your friend!"
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Exactly
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, thank you. Well, thank you all three of you for joining me for this conversation. I hope you're as inspired as I am and I look forward to seeing how this influences our work and the work of the teachers who are listening today. So thank you so much.
Gina Dignon:
Thanks, Jen.
Alison Porcelli:
Thank you. And thank, thank, yes. Nice meeting you too. Thank you so much for bringing this important topic to your podcast.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Absolutely.